Ladd] PARITA AND SANTA MARIA ARCHEOLOGY, PANAMA 3 



dillo, raccoon, and bats. Reptiles, including snakes and turtles, are 

 present, and alligators are especially common along the coastal areas. 

 Fish and shellfish abound along the coast. 



ETHNOGRAPHY 



Panama today is inhabited by three main native groups: the 

 Guayml west of the Chagres River, and the Cuna and Choc6 to the 

 east. All three are linguistically affiliated with South rather than 

 Middle America. The Guayml and Cuna speak languages classified 

 as Macro-Chibchan and the Choc6 speak a language assigned to the 

 Paezan subfamily, formerly held to be a member of the Chibchan 

 family but now seen as possibly having affinities with the Andean- 

 Equatorial phylum (Greenberg, 1956; Tax, 1960). The Guaymi, 

 although divided at the time of the Conquest into fairly clear-cut 

 and compact political groupings, today live either in loose communities 

 or as extended family households fairly well separated from each other. 

 Subsistence is based on hunting and fishing and a combination of 

 slash and burn farming. Their horticulture includes such crops as 

 maize, beans, and sweet manioc (Johnson, 1948). The Cuna, located 

 on the San Bias Islands east of the Chagres River and on the adjacent 

 mainland, combine island trading with cultivating bananas, plantain, 

 corn, and sweet manioc. Hunting is definitely a secondary activity, 

 and their settlement pattern is one of compact villages (Stout, 1948 a). 

 The Choc6, living in dwellings scattered along the rivers to the east 

 and south, are seminomadic hunters, fishers, and farmers. The rela- 

 tive importance of agriculture as opposed to hunting and fishing varies 

 with the environment (Stout, 1948 b). 



Linares (MS., 1962) has made a persuasive argument for a roughly 

 similar distribution of the aboriginal tribes at the time of the Con- 

 quest, i.e., that the Indians encountered by the Spaniards west of 

 Chame were Guayml, and that those to the east of Chame who spoke 

 the Coiba and Cueva languages may correspond to the present-day 

 Cuna. In support of the first portion of this thesis, Linares cites two 

 main points: (a) that the names of the chiefs listed by the Spaniards 

 for western Panama are now recognized as Guaymi names and (6) 

 that the only native vocabulary from Code Province (Pinart, 1882) 

 is also Guayml. Steward and Faron (1959), however, beheve that 

 the archeology of Code (with the possible and significant exception 

 of Sitio Conte) is definitely representative of native Cuna. 



The inhabitants of western Panama described in the 16th-century 

 chronicles (see Lothrop, 1937, for a detailed description based on 

 these sources) may be classified with the Circum-Caribbean culture 

 as presented by Steward in 1948. They were grouped together in 



